Suggestions for XRP Ledger enhancements

[JoelKatz]

Since 2012, Ripple has been committed to advancing the XRP Ledger as an open, decentralized system for payments. We have worked together with the community to dramatically increase the decentralization, performance, and feature set over the last seven years. 

Ripple’s vision for the XRP Ledger is for it to continue to provide the best interoperability with Interledger. Key to this vision is for the XRP Ledger to remain best in class in security, performance, and settlement features.

We’ve been working on a number of possible features and design changes that could be introduced to the XRP Ledger, and we want input from the entire community about these features. How helpful are they to the use cases that the community is currently pursuing? What changes are developers and contributors to XRP Ledger interested in implementing?

Today, we are posting descriptions of many possible enhancements to the XRP Ledger. They fall broadly into three categories:

Consensus: Consensus is the heart of the XRP Ledger. It’s the way the ledger makes forward progress in a decentralized way. While PoW has provided only limited decentralization and appears to be a technological dead end, distributed agreement algorithms such as the XRP Ledger’s consensus algorithm provide real decentralization and continue to improve in their performance and reliability, year after year. Several of the suggested enhancements focus on improving the robustness of the XRP Ledger’s consensus mechanism.

Performance and Resource Consumption: Due to the nature of public ledger systems, every on-ledger transaction imposes some resource costs on every participant. This creates a trade-off where increasing the transaction rate and lowering transaction fees can increase operational costs and drive some participants out of the ecosystem. Keeping resource consumption down increases the set of participants who can run their own server nodes, improving decentralization. Some of the suggested improvements aim to increase our understanding of the software’s resource consumption, reduce the consumption of bandwidth and memory, and improve network reliability.

Features: The XRP Ledger currently has a sophisticated feature set including account management features, powerful multisigning, a decentralized exchange, and best-in-class support for off-ledger scaling. However, there are always more things it could do. The suggested improvements in this category add new capabilities such as an XRP-collateralized stablecoin and ways to ease the burden of the 20 XRP account reserve.

We would appreciate members of the  XRP Ledger community looking over these suggestions and providing feedback. Suggestions for other features are welcome as well. Let’s build a roadmap to continue innovating together.

You can find all of the suggestions in one place on Xpring's blog post. There are also links there to the individual forum posts for each feature for discussions.

[King34Maine]

Hey @JoelKatz it would probably be best if you created a Club with these various topics listed in a single location. Maybe one of the moderators @Pablo, @Mercury, @Global, @Morty, @xrphilosophy, could help you get that set-up. It would probably be a good thing if they could also pin it to the "Active Topics" list so that everyone can see it  regardless of what topic heading they under.

[Sukrim]

Clubs have a very limited visibility, but I agree that this is maybe not the optimal format... I am unsure what would be though - GitHub issues? Formal RFCs? Chat rooms? Anyways, thanks for engaging an open discussion about these ideas in the first place, since so far it felt a lot like features were either implemented out of personal motivation or business needs and not widely feedbacked before a Pull Request landed.

Let's hope a few more developers from Ripple will also join the discussion on here! :-)

 

Edit: Here's a helpful post by @Hodor that links to all the threads (probably better to have this on the first page of the thread here):

 

6 hours ago, Hodor said:

This thread is pinned, so here is a listing of all the sub-topics with links:

 

Introduction https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33070-suggestions-for-xrp-ledger-enhancements/

Play Forward Ledger https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33071-suggestion-play-forward-ledger/

Robustness Improvements https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33072-suggestion-robustness-improvements/

Two-layer Consensus https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33073-suggestion-two-layer-consensus/?tab=comments#comment-773903

Investigate/reduce Memory Consumption https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33074-suggestion-investigatereduce-memory-consumption/

Reduce Relaying https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33075-suggestion-reduce-relaying/

Network Database https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33076-suggestion-network-database/

Logging and Monitoring Improvements https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33077-suggestion-logging-and-monitoring-improvements/

Transaction Fee Tracking https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33078-suggestion-transaction-fee-tracking/

XRP-Collateralized Stablecoins https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33079-suggestion-xrp-collateralized-stablecoins/

DeFi Support Enhancements https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33080-suggestion-defi-support-enhancements/

Checks https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33081-suggestion-checks/

Deletable Accounts https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33082-suggestion-deletable-accounts/

Light Accounts https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/33083-suggestion-light-accounts/

Edited October 5, 2019 by Sukrim

[Fleshmeister]

Yes, a lot of good suggestions. I look forward to reading more about this. Thanks for including us.

[Kakoyla]

Re:Performance and Resource Consumption

For me the memory requirements are the most expensive aspect of running a stock node. Assuming memory will get cheaper, keeping the requirement of ~16-32gb, no matter what the future average tps is would be very helpful to the average Joe's budgeting. 

[warpaul]

34 minutes ago, Sukrim said:

Let's hope a few more developers from Ripple will also join the discussion on here! :-)

We're here and we're listening👂

[nikb]

26 minutes ago, Fleshmeister said:

Yes, a lot of good suggestions. I look forward to reading more about this. Thanks for including us.

Hello! 

[Pablo]

@JoelKatz If you need any help, just let me know. We can help create a separate sub if things become unwieldy but your suggestion to create separate threads and cross-links works fine too.

For now, I can feature this thread so you can treat it as the hub for the other threads.

 

[nikb]

10 minutes ago, Pablo said:

@JoelKatz If you need any help, just let me know. We can help create a separate sub if things become unwieldy but your suggestion to create separate threads and cross-links works fine too.

For now, I can feature this thread so you can treat it as the hub for the other threads.

 

Thanks @Pablo!

[Undershoes]

"technological dead end" - shots fired!

I really enjoy you, David. You do great work and communicate well. Thanks - I wish you the best.

Edit: From a product point of view, I really like the idea of robust auditing. Given the complexity of features offered by XRP,  the need for log compliance,  a demand for "tier 0" SIEM integration , actionable log workflows, forensics, etc - clients certainly will appreciate attention here. 

 

Edited October 2, 2019 by Undershoes

[mitchlang009]

I'm not sure if this is reasonable but something I think would be useful is an option to require a condition with EscrowCancel like EscrowFinish has.  This would be useful for letting a 3rd party decide whether the funds get transferred or not and not relying on a time based lock.

Edited October 2, 2019 by mitchlang009

[mcgyve]

Hello. Would you ever consider bringing back ripple names (e.g. ~xrpchat)?  Would it add value to certain use cases to make it simpler to identify a payee?

[jcdenton]

Thanks for this. Checks seem like a no-brainer considering Ripple's partners. 

Are the ideas about robustness related to Stellar's network outage in any way? 

[XRPLearner]

"The suggested improvements in this category add new capabilities such as an XRP-collateralized stablecoin and ways to ease the burden of the 20 XRP account reserve."

 

Because it's going to be very costly holding 20 xrp worth as the wallet reserve...

[Guest]

22 hours ago, JoelKatz said:

We’ve been working on a number of possible features and design changes that could be introduced to the XRP Ledger, and we want input from the entire community about these features.

Sounds like you have already built the features and as kitao would say "just have to press button" to implement them. Whats the ETA?